When the Algorithm Kills: Inside Singapore’s “The Jury Experience”

I’ll be honest: I walked into tonight’s performance with pretty high expectations for courtroom acting. When you’ve seen Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson go head-to-head in “A Few Good Men,” that becomes your benchmark. So yes, the performances in “The Jury Experience: Death by AI: Who Pays the Price?” weren’t quite at that level—but that’s also kind of missing the point of what this thing actually is.

Because this isn’t really about watching great actors perform. It’s about what happens when you stop being a spectator and become part of the decision.

What Actually Happens

The setup is straightforward: you’re a juror in a case involving a fatal accident caused by a self-driving car. The car’s algorithm made a split-second decision to swerve to avoid hitting someone, but in doing so, it killed someone else. Now someone has to answer for that death—but who? The creator, the owner, or the technology itself?

The production runs about an hour. You take your assigned seat, no intermission. For the next sixty minutes, you’re not an audience member. You’re part of the jury. You’ll vote three times using your phone—a QR code flashes on the screen projection, you scan it, and suddenly your individual decision becomes part of the collective verdict. First vote: an initial guilty or not guilty verdict after hearing the opening arguments and evidence. Second, you’ll choose which question to ask the defendant directly—the room collectively decides what we need to know. And third, the final verdict after all testimonies and deliberations. Your votes aren’t symbolic—they determine the outcome of this particular performance in real-time.

In the October 10th performance I attended, the preliminary vote leaned toward not guilty. For the second vote, we collectively chose our question for the defendant. By the final count, 56% of us acquitted the defendant. But 44% didn’t.

The Hook That Got Me

Look, I’m not going to pretend the acting was on par with major film productions. It wasn’t. But the local cast—led by Tejas V Hirah as Local Show Director—delivered solid, committed performances that served the story. Liam “Lemon” McDonald brought gravitas as Judge Edward Thompson, while Joshua Elias and Yulin Ng sparred effectively as the opposing attorneys. Christopher Yong as defendant Anthony Ho had the unenviable task of being the person we had to judge, and Rachel Linn Braberry as plaintiff Gina Rivers carried the weight of loss convincingly enough to make the stakes feel real.

You’re not going to walk out quoting brilliant line deliveries or marveling at someone’s dramatic range. But that wasn’t what got me.

What got me was something else entirely: the moment I realized my vote actually mattered.

There’s a specific point in the experience where you submit your preliminary vote through your phone and then the results flash on screen—the percentages, the split. You see how your fellow jurors voted and you start looking around the room differently. Who voted guilty? Who voted not guilty? Are they seeing something I’m not? Did I miss something crucial?

Then comes something even more interesting: we get to choose what question to ask the defendant. Three options appear on screen, you vote on your phone, and the room collectively decides which one matters most. It’s a small detail, but it completely changes the dynamic—we’re not just passively receiving information anymore. We’re directing the investigation, deciding what we need to hear to make our final decision.

And then the case continues, more evidence comes out based on what we asked, and you’re forced to reconsider. Maybe you were right the first time. Maybe you weren’t. The play doesn’t tell you. It just keeps presenting information and asking: What do you think?

The Question That Follows You Home

Here’s the case in a nutshell: An AI-powered self-driving car had to make an impossible choice in a fraction of a second. Swerve and kill Person A, or stay the course and kill Person B. The algorithm chose. Someone died.

Who’s responsible? The car manufacturer? The software engineers who wrote the code? The owner who bought the car? The deceased? The person who would have been killed if the car hadn’t swerved?

The play lays out the testimonies, the technical details, the human cost. Then it puts the question to you: Guilty or not guilty?

What makes this genuinely interesting isn’t the staging or the performances—it’s that there isn’t a clear answer. This isn’t a murder mystery where all the clues point to one conclusion. It’s a genuine ethical dilemma where reasonable people, looking at the same evidence, come to completely different conclusions.

56% of us voted not guilty tonight. Were we right? I have no idea. And the play doesn’t tell you. You just have to sit with your decision and the knowledge that nearly half the room disagreed with you.

Why This Format Works

Interactive theater can be gimmicky. Sometimes it’s just “press a button to feel involved” without any real stakes. But “Death by AI” works because the participation serves a purpose.

The case itself is ripped from our current reality. Self-driving cars are already on the roads. Algorithms are already making decisions about human safety. And when something goes wrong, we’re going to have to figure out how to assign responsibility. This isn’t science fiction—it’s probably going to be in the news within the next few years, if it hasn’t been already.

By putting you in the jury box, the play forces you to grapple with something you’d normally encounter as an abstract philosophical debate. It’s one thing to discuss trolley problems over drinks. It’s another to actually have to make a binding decision about someone’s guilt, knowing that your vote counts and that you’ll have to defend it, at least to yourself.

Credit to director Tejas V Hirah and stage manager Giovanni Harris for executing this concept smoothly. The production, brought to Singapore through Fever’s global live entertainment platform, maintains its momentum throughout the hour. The technical elements—the voting system, the projections, the pacing—all work seamlessly enough that you forget you’re participating in a logistical feat and just focus on the case itself.

The Uncomfortable Truth

What stuck with me most wasn’t the verdict. It was the split.

56-44 isn’t unanimous. It’s not even close to unanimous. We all sat in the same room, heard the same testimonies, saw the same evidence. And we came to opposite conclusions.

Nobody was wrong, exactly. Or maybe everybody was wrong. The play doesn’t judge your vote. It just reveals the vote totals and lets you sit with the implications.

In a weird way, that’s the most realistic part of the whole experience. Because when we actually have to deal with AI liability in the real world—when real courts have to decide real cases—it’s probably going to look a lot like this. Messy. Divided. No clear villains. Just difficult questions about foresight, responsibility, and what happens when the systems we build have consequences we didn’t fully anticipate.

The Verdict (Mine, Anyway)

Would I recommend this? Yeah, actually.

Not because the acting is going to blow you away—it won’t. Not because it’s a polished piece of theater that will sweep you up emotionally—it’s more cerebral than that.

I’d recommend it because it’s genuinely thought-provoking in a way that most “interactive experiences” aren’t. It treats you like an adult capable of complex moral reasoning. It doesn’t preach or guide you toward a “correct” answer. It just presents a problem that’s increasingly relevant to our lives and asks: What would you do?

The format might sound gimmicky on paper, but in practice, it creates something traditional theater can’t: genuine uncertainty about whether you made the right choice. I voted. The verdict is in. And I’m still not sure if I got it right.

That’s not a flaw. That’s the point.

Tonight, 56% of us said not guilty. Tomorrow night, with a different crowd, it might swing the other way. The case doesn’t change. The evidence doesn’t change. But the verdict does.

And somehow, that feels like the most honest thing a play about AI and responsibility could possibly do.

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“The Jury Experience: Death by AI: Who Pays the Price?” is currently showing in Singapore. For tickets and more information, visit TheJuryExperience.com or check Fever’s platform.

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